September Meditation

I wake up cold with the covers drifting off the bed. I put on my new purple tie-dye leggings, a yoga top and a heavy gray pull-over sweatshirt. I refuse socks.

I’m late. I quickly make coffee and toast, take it in the car and dash to meditation class – aware that I’m dashing, that I have chosen to leave the car running in park while I dash yet again to let in Luna, the cat whom I have noticed perched forlornly on the arm of a deck chair. She is cold, too.

Unlike other early morning drives to meditation, today i am hoping for red lights. I get the first one and relish the pause to sip hot coffee. I am hoping to be able to stop at the high school crossing, which is usually jammed at this hour with students and teachers also dashing. No luck. I am waved through. Luckily I get the only other possibility for a red light and finish my toast.

Margaret, my meditation teacher, asks this question, “What is the feeling tone in the body right now?” She probes further.

“How do you know? Where does the information come from?”

Honestly, I don’t know. I am aware of breathing, of kneeling astride a meditation cushion, of yawning, of wishing I had brought my coffee with me, aware that perhaps caffeine with meditation is an oxymoron, chuckling at feeling moronic myself at the association.

I have taken meditation with Margaret for two years. Only being out of town or seriously ill, which I rarely am, keeps me from getting up 60-90 minutes earlier than my body really likes and plunking myself on a cushion in a basement-cave yoga studio. The good think about not taking my coffee in to meditation is that I can have my second cup of coffee now, in the sun, after showering and successfully transitioning from night to day without a meltdown.

I hate September, I realized this morning looking for my feeling tones. I hate the cold, the encroaching dark. I hate having to wear more clothes, especially socks. I hate not being able to comfortably be outside. My mind latches on to this hook. The boat zips ahead, dragging me along behind, until I hit a wave and flop off. Sinking back into the breath, I catch myself waking back up to my cushion and Margaret’s voice saying, “I feel my throat closing.”

“Oh, yeah, my throat is also tight,” I think. No surprise there. Just thinking can close my throat. I notice it is constricted right now, that my jaw is stiff at the hinge. “Ah,” I sigh. Noticing my habitual patterns, it relaxes a bit.

I hate September. I hate the communal slamming of the door to summer and the wholesale hurl into doing – more, more, more. Margaret tells us she has made herself too busy this fall. “I did it to myself, “she says, ” so I am teaching what I need, which is to be aware of what I’m feeling and drop into that meditation state of aware acceptance even amidst the clatter.”

September is the month I am having, not August or July. At the moment, I am writing in the sun with bare legs and arms. By mid-day in September, it is the late side of summer, hot with a cool breeze, the best of both seasons. Bees and wasps are very busy getting every last drop of nectar before the flowers fade completely.

A red dragonfly just landed on my ankle attached to a second dragonfly. In the language of totems, dragonflies are about seeing through illusions – the illusion that I need to resist September and the cold, dark time it ushers in. I am not having a cold, dark time. I am having a face-to-the-sun, warm-colored flowers, red-tinged leaves, hair-blowing-breeze, puff-white-clouds time.

I have learned two invaluable truths from meditation. One is the only moment we have is right now. Staying with ourselves in each moment is the way to actually live life – right here, right now, no matter what. The second truth is that trying to make what is present go away never works. It just creates constriction and frustration. Acceptance – summer is waning; a friend is dying; I am aging -takes the fight out of my body. After holding my breath out, I inhale and expand. I can breathe again. My lips relax upward all by themselves. At this moment, the feeling tone is relief.